Three women found dead near Greece's Evros river border with Turkey

ATHENS, Oct 10 (Reuters) - Three women of unknown origin were found dead on Wednesday on the Greek side of the river border between Turkey and Greece, police sources said, an area known for illegal migrant crossings.

The bodies, found in a field by a passerby, lay a short distance from each other near a migration route from Turkey over the Evros River frontier to northeastern Greece, though it was not yet known whether the women were migrants.

The cause of death was not immediately known.

"They were found 50 metres away from the river," a police official told Reuters. A local website, e-evros.gr, reported that it appeared the women had been struck with a sharp object, though this had not yet been confirmed.

The Evros border area straddles an old people smuggling corridor that regained popularity after European Union and Turkish authorities in 2016 sealed off sea routes in the Aegean used by hundreds of thousands of migrants in 2015.

In the first half of 2018, more than 10,000 migrants and refugees arrived in Greece from Turkey by crossing the Evros, a non-governmental aid agency said in August. (Reporting by Michele Kambas and Lefteris Papadimas, editing by Mark Heinrich)